AMECO seeks a broader customer base in North America

Gary Bernardez, CEO of AMECO

AMECO said it will target a diversification of its customer base in North America beyond its historic strength in oil and gas and energy projects following its divestment by long-time parent Fluor Corp.

Gary Bernardez, the former AMECO president who has returned to the company as CEO under its new private equity owner, said it would work hard to “earn” continued business with former parent Fluor, but would target new customers on mid-to large-scale construction and maintenance projects.

“We know what our sweet spots are primarily mid- to large-size projects, where we can show a contractor value over multiple projects,” said Bernardez. “We like to simplify their site execution complexity, because projects are just complex.

“And when we get plugged into a contractor on the front end, given our 75 years of living inside of a contractor, we can do some things commercially and service level wise that make us a little different. I think that brings more value to a contract.”

AMECO has negotiated a long-term master agreement with Fluor, its largest current customer, but over time aims to diversify to the point that Fluor represents around 20% of its business. Bernardez said the target is to double the size of the business within four years.

“AMECO’s strategy over the past few years had changed to be more of a support organization to the parent company,” he said.

“We had a run where we served a tremendous number of external clients. So, now we have a clear-cut mandate with our new owner, One Equity Partners, to extend AMECO to the North American construction and maintenance market.

“Fluor is our largest single customer, but AMECO is still pretty diverse in North America outside of Fluor, and our job is to make that even more diverse.”

Bernardez said AMECO’s experience of managing large projects would be valuable in building and maintaining large industrial facilities such as battery and automotive plants.

“We want to apply our asset management and site services approach to those kinds of large-scale projects,” he said. “We can unleash AMECO because there were people that wouldn’t do business with us before, because we were owned by Fluor.”